Rural Remix

Tony Pipa is part policy wonk, part story teller. He focuses on connecting with policy makers, local leaders, and community members to reimagine federal policy to fit the needs of rural America. He uses his wide range of expertise to uplift stories of progress and success in rural communities.We talk with the native rural Pennsylvanian about the diversity of rural America, his new podcast, and bringing the rural story to Washington D.C. Tony Pipa is a senior fellow in the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution. Tony launched and leads the Reimagining Federal Rural Policy initative, which seeks to modernize and transform U.S. federal policy to enable community and economic development in underserved rural places across the U.S. He hosts the Reimagine Rural podcast, which profiles rural towns across America that are making progress on their efforts to thrive amid social and economic change. Tony serves as the vice-chair of the board of directors of StriveTogether; as a senior associate research fellow in the Global Cities program at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies; and as a member of several task forces and advisory committees. He grew up in rural Elysburg, Pennsylvania, in the heart of anthracite coal country and attended Stanford University, graduated from Duke University, and earned a Master of Public Administration at the Harvard Kennedy School.  

The United States is the world's largest incarcerator. Many of the prisons built since the 1990s are in rural places, particularly in Central Appalachia as an economic development strategy to replace the coal industry. The prison economy of Central Appalachia figures strongly into the work of both our guests, multimedia artist and organizer Sylvia Ryerson and professor and author Judah Schept. Ryerson is a multimedia artist, organizer and PhD candidate in American Studies at Yale University. For over a decade, her work rooted at the intersection of scholarship, activism and art, has probed the overlapping crises of racialized mass incarceration, rural economic abandonment, and environmental destruction. She is also the director of a new documentary Calls from Home, which documents WMMT.FM's longstanding radio show that sends familial messages of love over public airwaves to reach people incarcerated in Central Appalachia. Schept is a professor in the School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University. His most recent book is Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia. He has been active with numerous organizations and campaigns centered on decarceration, criminalization and abolition.  About our guests Sylvia Ryerson is a PhD Candidate in American Studies at Yale University, with a Master’s concentration in the public humanities. Prior to graduate school she worked as an independent radio producer, and at the Appalshop media arts and education center in Whitesburg, Kentucky. There she served as a reporter and the director of public affairs programming, and co-directed Appalshop/WMMT-FM’s Hip Hop from the Hilltop & Calls from Home radio show, a nationally recognized weekly radio program broadcasting music and toll-free phone messages from family members to their loved ones incarcerated, and Making Connections News, a multimedia community storytelling project documenting efforts for a just transition from coal extraction. Her research questions build from this work, and are rooted at the intersection of scholarship, activism, and art.  Judah Schept is a Professor in the School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University. He is the author of Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia (New York University Press, 2022) and Progressive Punishment: Job Loss, Jail Growth, and the Neoliberal Logic of Carceral Expansion (New York University Press, 2015. He is co-editor of The Jail is Everywhere: Fighting the New Geography of Mass Incarceration (Verso Books, 2024). He holds a PhD from Indiana University and a BA from Vassar College. https://youtu.be/CPlHM3aIsXQ Everywhere Radio spotlight the good, scrappy and joyful ways rural people and their allies are building a more inclusive nation. Everywhere Radio is a production of the Rural Assembly. Get the Rural Assembly in your inbox: https://www.ruralassembly.org/newsletters

Guest host Claire Carlson interviews Bruce Poinsette, an Oregon based writer, organizer, and educator whose work focuses on the Black experience in Oregon and the historic and current racial tensions that shape this experience. He hosts the YouTube series “The Blacktastic Adventure: A Virtual Exploration of Oregon’s Black Diaspora” and “The Bruce Poinsette Show” on 96.7 The Numberz FM, Portland’s Black radio station. Most recently, Bruce was the Community Storytelling Fellow for Oregon Humanities, an organization that facilitates conversations and publishers writing from the perspectives of Oregonians who have been ignored or marginalized. Claire and Bruce discuss what it's like to report on the people who have built rural America but have been excluded from its historical record, disrupt some of the misconceptions about living in both rural and urban Oregon, and talk about how to build more inclusive communities wherever you are. Get these interviews in your inbox: https://www.ruralassembly.org/newsletters About Bruce: Bruce Poinsette is a writer whose work is primarily based in the Portland Metro Area. A former reporter for the Skanner News Group, his writing has also appeared in the Oregonian, Street Roots, Oregon Humanities, and Eater PDX, as well as projects such as the Mercatus Collective and the Urban League of Portland’s State of Black Oregon 2015. He hosts the YouTube series “The Blacktastic Adventure: A Virtual Exploration of Oregon’s Black Diaspora” and “The Bruce Poinsette Show” on 96.7 The Numberz FM, Portland’s Black radio station. Poinsette also works with Respond to Racism LO, a grassroots anti-racism organization in his hometown of Lake Oswego, Oregon.

Our guest Dawn Luedtke is a council woman in Montgomery County, Maryland. Montgomery County is just outside of Washington D.C. yet it includes a surprising amount of rural land. In fact, it's home to the Agricultural Reserve, 93,000 acres preserved for farm land and rural space and hailed as one of the best examples of land use policy in the country. Luedtke was elected to the council in 2022 to represent a newly created district that includes much of Montgomery County's rural spaces. We talk with Luedtke about the opportunities to make these rural voices heard in a diverse county, improving mental health access, and her love of theater. About Dawn Luedtke Dawn Luedtke is a community advocate, former Assistant Attorney General, certified law enforcement trainer and expert on healthy schools and public safety serving her first term on the Montgomery County Council.  She was elected in 2022 to represent the newly created District 7, including Ashton, Brookeville, Damascus, Derwood, Laytonsville, Montgomery Village, Olney, Redland, Sandy Spring, and northeast Montgomery County.  Dawn is committed to providing world-class constituent service, fostering a business environment for local small businesses to thrive, preventing crime through enhanced community policing, improving behavioral health and crisis response, and protecting Montgomery County’s farmers, food, and Agricultural Reserve. She serves on the Council’s Public Safety and Health and Human Services Committees. Dawn is a certified law enforcement trainer on school safety, implicit bias, hate crimes and other critical public safety issues, where she has taught and worked with law enforcement officials across Maryland. She served in the Office of the Attorney General of Maryland as Counsel to the Maryland Longitudinal Data System Center, Maryland Center for School Safety, Food Systems Resiliency Council, and Active Assailant Interdisciplinary Work Group. She also advised State agencies on topics including open government and government operations, and oversaw the creation of the State’s Model Behavioral Threat Assessment Policy for K-12 Schools.  Dawn also served as Chair of the Prevention Subcommittee of the Active Assailant Interdisciplinary Work Group, a member of the Behavioral Health Administration’s workgroup on involuntary commitment standards, the Maryland Institute for Emergency Medical Services Systems’ Crisis Response Work Group, and as a member of the Youth & Families Subcommittee of the Governor’s Commission to Study Mental & Behavioral Health. A longtime theater performer and advocate, Dawn is Vice President of the Opera Baltimore Board of Directors, Secretary of the University of Pennsylvania Glee Club Graduate Club Board of Directors, and previously served on the Boards of Directors of the Olney Theatre Center, Transformation Theater, LLC, and the Bruce Montgomery Foundation for the Arts. Dawn lives in Ashton with her husband Eric and four children.

What is an Office of Rural Prosperity? Both Kansas and Wisconsin have them, and on this episode we talk with the two women charged with running them: Beth Haskovec, from Wisconsin, and Trisha Purdon, of Kansas.  Statewide Offices of Rural Prosperity are dedicated to ensuring rural stakeholders are part of the equation, across policy, capital, resource management — and that rural people and places are connected to those programs and pathways that contribute to community prosperity. About our guests Beth Haskovec is the Director for the Office of Rural Prosperity within the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC). In this role, Beth works to advance rural Wisconsin through interagency collaboration and resource navigation. Priorities of the Office include broadband access & accessibility, rural housing, ecosystem building at the local and regional levels, small business & entrepreneurship, and promoting rural culture through placemaking and tourism. Beth comes to the Office of Rural Prosperity from LISC, one of the nation’s largest CDFIs, where she oversaw strategies and programs related to access to capital for small businesses across Rural America, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. She brings a wealth of expertise in commercial real estate development, commercial corridor development, small business capital, entrepreneurship and initiatives at the intersection of arts and culture and economic development. Originally, Beth is from a one stop light county in rural Iowa. She brings this passion for rural communities and culture to her role as the Director of Rural Prosperity. Trisha Purdon is the Director of the Office of Rural Prosperity in the Kansas Department of Commerce. She attended the University of Kansas where she earned a master’s degree in Public Administration with a focus on local government Management and a Bachelor’s degree in Social Welfare with a focus on public policy. Trisha has worked as a rural economic developer in both city and county-level leadership roles for over a decade. She grew up in the small town of Kiowa, Kansas, and is a graduate of Chaparral High School in Anthony, Kansas.

Whitney Kimball Coe talks with Brother Hill (Brett Hill), folk musician, singer, songwriter, and humanitarian volunteer from southern Ohio, known for his dynamic voice, insightful lyricism, and engaging stage presence. Brother Hill performs as frontman in Appalachian folk-quintet “Hill Spirits” and also as American representative of the Ukrainian-Belarusian-American folk project “Slavalachia”, which has allied representatives of Slavic and American folk traditions together since 2019 to promote cultural solidarity and forge new bridges for creative cultural expression. Hill visited eastern Ukraine delivering donations of medical supplies and performing for Ukrainian troops fighting on the frontlines as part of the “From Ohio With Love” campaign, which he founded with colleague Benya Stewart within the first week of the full-scale invasion in February 2022. To date the grassroots campaign has raised over $86,000 for Ukrainian causes, primarily through folk concerts in Ohio. Funds raised support the hand-delivery of CAT tourniquets and Advanced Bleed Control Kits to mobilized units across Ukraine. Hill will be returning to Ukraine in May for another delivery of supplies, and to continue fortifying long-standing cultural support through performances across the country and collaborations with Ukrainian artists. Besides his work abroad, Brett Hill is an active partner with United Plant Savers Botanical Sanctuary in Meigs County, Ohio, as member of their Deep Ecology Fellowship. Since receiving this fellowship in 2020, Hill and United Plant Savers have collaborated with West End Distillery in Athens, Ohio to craft Hill Spirits Elder Gin- a sustainably and locally sourced botanical gin, the proceeds of which ($5000 since July 2021) go to benefit American Ginseng preservation in southeast Ohio. Hill has self-released three albums under the Brother Hill moniker (the Summoning of Brother Hill [2017], the Dereliction of Brother Hill [2019], and Blackfish [2021]) as well as two albums with Hill Spirits (Omens EP [2020], Hill Spirits [2020]) and a full length self-titled album with folk alliance Slavalachia [2022]. Released this Spring will be compilation album Three Gardens, featuring Slavalachia counterparts Benya Stewart and Siarzhuk Douhushau (of Belarus). The three began recording the compilation within two months of the invasion as a means of coping with the realities of war and separation from their Ukrainian bandmates who remained in Ukraine. It is a compilation of content varying from songs learned during their time in Ukraine, to original songs written about the war, to traditional Appalachian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian folk materials.

Whitney Kimball Coe talks with filmmakers Dee Davis, Mimi Pickering, and Joel Cohen about their new half-hour documentary, East Kentucky Flood. They share why they felt compelled to gather and share stories of those who witnessed the July 2022 flooding that devastated the region that Davis and Pickering call home.  "I think the intensity of the moment is powerful," Davis said. "People will be able to tell these stories for 50 years. They're not going to forget them. There is this urgency at the time, which is, 'I have seen something, mister, and I have to tell you this.' That's important to be someone who listens deeply to those stories because within them are just the basic components of being human." The Center for Rural Strategies film tells the story of the flood by those who endured it. The stories reveal not just what happened July 2022, but what lies ahead for communities across East Kentucky. The half -hour program will premiere at 10 p.m. Wednesday, February 15, 2023, on KET,  Kentucky's public television network, and will air other times throughout the month of February.  The video will be available for streaming on Thursday, February 16 at dailyyonder.com. Learn more about our guests and the documentary at https://ruralassembly.org/podcasts/everywhere-radio-flood-doc/

On this episode, we talk with Jonathan Blair and Sam Schimmel about the work they’re doing to strengthen their rural communities in Appalachia and Alaska. Blair and Schimmel are two of three co-creators of an ongoing documentary media and public engagement initiative – American Creed: Citizen Power —  that explores American idealism and activism from a range of young adult perspectives. American Creed: Citizen Power is the forthcoming follow-up to the 2018 Citizen Film PBS production American Creed. To hear more from these extraordinary young adults, be sure to RSVP for Rural Assembly’s upcoming “Connecting Our Heartlands” event Jan. 19 to join the conversation with these young leaders and a panel of civic luminaries: David M. Kennedy (Stanford University Lane Center for the American West), Eric Liu (Citizen University) and Danielle Allen (Harvard University Safra Center for Ethics). About our guests Sam Schimmel is a first-year law student at Georgetown University. Schimmel plans to use what he learns in law school to help his people negotiate a healthier, more sustainable economy that aligns with his community’s values and the need to protect the environment.  At Connecting Our Heartlands, Schimmel will show his photo essay and discuss his Kenaitze Tribe’s movement to restore Indigenous rights to subsistence fishing and economic development in alignment with community values. (Click here to view his Daily Yonder photo essay "Salmon Tales: Subsistence on the Kenai Peninsula") Jonathan Blair lives, works, and studies at Alice Lloyd College, in Eastern Kentucky. He coordinates a work-study crew of about 60 people, mostly first-generation college students from rural Appalachia. Together with two of his crew members—Jacob Frazier and Carlos Villanueva—they document their connection to blue-collar work in and around the Appalachian coal industry, and they reflect on their hopes for the region.  (Click here to view his Daily Yonder viewfinder article "Phantom of the Black Diamond")

Erickson "EB" Blakney grew up in Toledo, Ohio, but has a strong connection to the Mississippi Delta. A filmmaker, journalist, and philanthropy professional, Blakney talks with host Whitney Kimball Coe about his work in Mississippi, rural films, and his hope that that journalists and philanthropists will begin to focus on what the region's people have to offer. A  program officer with the New York-based The Pinkerton Foundation, Blakney's is also an award-winning writer and reporter having worked for Bloomberg and CBS News. A member of the National Press Club, Blakney is the co-founder, along with author and award-winning filmmaker Dr. Lee Quinby, of the True Delta Project which produces documentaries about the Delta region which air on Mississippi Public Broadcasting Television (MPB) and screen at film festivals around the country. His most recent documentary, Zip Code Matters (2021, produced in partnership with Sena Mourad Friedman and The Fair Housing Center-Toledo, examines racial and socioeconomic inequalities in health. EB is a board trustee of the DreamYard Project, an arts and social justice organization in the Bronx.  He plays a similar role on the board of the Clarksdale Animal Rescue Effort and Shelter (CARES) in Clarksdale, MS. Because of his filmmaking and philanthropic work in the rural Delta, he was invited to serve as a board member for The Center for Rural Strategies in Whitesburg, KY. Blakney also serves on the grant review and finance committees of The Needmor Fund. Founded in 1956 by Duane and Virginia Secor Stranahan, the Perrysburg, Ohio-based philanthropy, supports grass-roots groups organizing to bring about social and economic justice. Blakney is a graduate of Hobart College and Maumee Valley Country Day School in Toledo, Ohio. Find the transcript at www.ruralassembly.org/podcasts/everywhere-radio-ericksonblakney

As we reach the end of a monumental year for reproductive justice, we talk with Rebecca Stern, a student activist and former Rural Assembly intern who spent her summer in Whitesburg, Ky. at The Center for Rural Strategies headquarters. Becca interviewed rural young people about their thoughts and concerns about reproductive justice following the reversal of Roe v. Wade. We talk with Becca about what she heard and we will be sharing those interviews and stories at www.ruralassembly.org. Rebecca Stern is a second-year Robertson Scholar at UNC Chapel Hill studying Public Policy and Global Gender Studies. This past summer, she interned at the Center for Rural Strategies, mainly working with the Rural Assembly on rural policy and writing a bit for the Daily Yonder. Her main project was interviewing rural youth about reproductive health and access to contraceptives and sex education following the overturn of Roe vs. Wade. At UNC and Duke, Rebecca is the Campus Outreach Coordinator and Advocate at the Community Empowerment Fund (CEF), a Bryan Fellow, Penny Pilgrim George Women's Leadership Initiative Cohort Member, and the Tour Manager of the UNC Loreleis.